This painting was created for Black Stars & White Paintings, the highly anticipated solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago of new paintings by New York-based abstract artist James Little, a critically and publicly celebrated highlight of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept. Little’s White Paintings demonstrate his nuanced sensibility towards both formal aesthetics and socio-political subtext. Topped with a glossy, vicious stratus of white oil paints, pierced with a geometric lattice of voids, their surfaces blaze with multitudes of swirling, prismatic rainbows. “The White Paintings are more or less experiments in color,” Little says. “The thing you see first is the last layer of paint, which is white. But if you look beyond the surface, within the squares and circles there’s a whole universe of activity. The paintings keep changing, keep engaging, and are animated. The title is catchy, and there’s a lot behind that. It’s where we live and how we live. It’s America. So I want to try to bring as much of that in as I can without sacrificing the integrity of what I’m trying to do.” When asked what he most hopes people take home with them after an encounter with his paintings, Little answers with his trademark combination of sincerity and wit: “Emotion. It’s about getting as much feeling out of the work as you can. There’s not a lot of verbiage surrounding what I do. You’re not gonna get a syllabi on my Black identity, or anything like that. The art world is overloaded with rhetoric and jargon. Just stop and put it on the wall and let’s see what happens. If it performs, it performs. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. To have to explain it is what creates the deficit for me. Those things get in the way of having an experience with the art.”